Despite high marks for some brands, report shows the fashion and luxury industry is missing an opportunity with social media

Brandwatch, the leading social intelligence company, today unveiled its Fashion & Luxury report that explores the social presence and strengths of 32 fashion and luxury brands. The report shows, while some fashion houses have strong social followings, many brands are surprisingly inactive on social media, overlooking a huge opportunity to leverage social intelligence insights across marketing, merchandising and other departments across the enterprise. The full Brandwatch Fashion & Luxury report can be downloaded here: https://www.brandwatch.com/report-luxury-fashion-industry/

The report finds that on an average day a luxury fashion brand tweets and posts on Facebook less than two times on each platform; substantially less than leading food and beverage brands that tweet nearly 27 times and post less than two times on Facebook in an average day. Furthermore, luxury fashion brands rarely respond directly to their audience, averaging less than one reply, retweet and comment per day. Again, that is substantially lower than the food and beverage industry.

The report also revealed that pop music icons play a big role in driving conversations for fashion brands among music fans – Justin Bieber was mentioned in relation to Calvin Klein over 87,000 times, Ariana Grandeincreased mentions of Coach, and Miley Cyrus did the same for Prada and Versace.

To produce the report, Brandwatch analyzed 721,140 social conversations featuring 32 luxury fashion brands such as Michael Kors, Tory Burch, and Armani on Facebook and Twitter and evaluated these brands across five key categories: social visibility, general visibility, net sentiment, reach growth, and social engagement and content.

Other key findings include:

Calvin Klein, Christian Dior, and Louis Vuitton received the highest scores overall in the five categories while Kenzo, Dsquared and DKNY sit at the bottom.

Chanel has the highest social visibility with an overall score of 100; Coach received the most positive sentiment with an overall score of 100.

The analysis suggests that luxury fashion brands are missing opportunities to connect with their engaged audience during key times of day. This particularly applies to Sundays and evenings between 9 p.m. - 11 p.m. while consumers are actively pursuing them on social, yet these brands are inactive.

Video and photo content perform best on Facebook for luxury fashion brands, accounting for 96 percent of Facebook posts and receiving the most engagement via likes, comments and shares.

For women, French fashion house Chloe leads the conversation, while men are largely tweeting about the Swiss watchmaker, Breitling.

Interestingly, artists, executives and students are most likely to discuss luxury fashion on social media, while politicians have almost no interest in the topic.

"The luxury fashion industry has been comparatively slow to attend to fans and followers on social media, with a few exceptions, which is surprising given this industry's commitment to top notch customer service and quality," said Adam Edwards, sector director at Brandwatch. "Luxury customers expect white glove service and, done right, social affords these brands a powerful platform for engaging and strengthening customer loyalty."

Brandwatch is the world's leading social intelligence company. Its social media listening and analytics technology platform gathers millions of online conversations every day and provides users with the tools to analyze them, empowering brands and agencies to make smarter, data-driven business decisions.

Acquiring social influencer analytics firm PeerIndex in December 2014, Brandwatch continues on its aggressive business trajectory following on its most recent round of venture funding to the tune of $22 million. The Brandwatch platform, ranked highest in customer satisfaction by G2Crowd in the Spring 2015 social media monitoring report, is used by over 1000 brands and agencies, including Cisco, Whole Foods, Whirlpool, British Airways, Sony Music, and Dell.